Microsoft and rivals jostle over open doc standard
,----[ Quote ]
| A campaign led by open-source body Open Forum Europe and the ODF
| Alliance is urging businesses to fight against the fast-tracking
| of the Office Open XML specification, Microsoft's open document
| format. In December, ECMA approved Office Open XML as a standard,
| a precursor to ratification by ISO
`----
http://www.linuxworld.com.au/index.php?id=1564655357&rid=-50
Related and recent:
Italy adopts OpenDocument as a National Standard
,----[ Quote ]
| Italy has adopted The OpenDocument Format (ISO/IEC 23600) as a
| national standard. The decision was made by UNI, the Italian
| Organization for Standardization, which is responsible, under
| appointment from the Italian Government and the EU, to develop,
| approve and publish technical standards in all economic sectors
| (industry, trade and services) except for electric and
| electro-technical ones.
`----
http://technocrat.net/d/2007/1/29/13965
ODF Can Handle Anything MSOffice Throws At It
,----[ Quote ]
| "ODF can handle everything and anything Microsoft Office can throw
| at it. Including the legacy billions of binary documents, years of
| MSOffice bound business processes, and even tricky low level
| reaching add-ons represented by assistive technologies....
|
| ...we recently made available a demonstration of the powerful but
| lightweight Da Vinci conversion engine.
`----
http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/79593/index.html
,----[ Quote ]
| "Becta is therefore calling on the ICT industry to ensure that computers
| for the education marketplace are delivered with a choice of Office
| productivity suites available, which ideally should include an open-source
| offering.
|
| The ability for schools to exercise choice is further restricted by
| interoperability difficulties and Becta is calling on Microsoft to improve
| its support for the ODF interoperability standard.
`----
http://schools.becta.org.uk/index.php?section=re&catcode=ss_res_pro_gbv_03&rid=12924
How Vista Lets Microsoft Lock Users In - Cory Doctorow
http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=196601781
The lock-out begins for Office Mac users
,----[ Quote ]
| Microsoft is calling these "Microsoft Office Open XML Formats", but
| Office for Mac users will find them far from "open". In fact, they
| can't read them.
|
| Take Word 2007, for example. By default it saves documents in the
| new *.docx format. Trying to open one of these in Word for Mac 2004
| yields the following garbled mess
`----
http://apcmag.com/node/4755
Microsoft used undocumented Windows APIs - Iowa testimony
,----[ Quote ]
| 'All I can say is holy API batman...I'm not kidding...we are talking
| about literally 500-800 APIs here, no joke,' he wrote.
|
| Alepin had earlier claimed that Microsoft ran special demonstration
| programs whose sole purpose was to crash rival products and alleged
| that the company had subverted developers who used Microsoft's
| version of Java 'thinking they were developing multi-platform
| applications, but were actually developing Windows-specific
| applications'.
`----
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/101947/microsoft-used-undocumented-windows-apis-iowa-testimony.html
|
|
